First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles provides a rich and timely critique of the school-to-prison pipeline metaphor by examining the historical and contemporary mechanisms that contribute to the imprisonment and criminalization of Black youth. To accomplish this, anthropologist Damien M. Sojoyner situates his ethnographic study of a public school in Los Angeles County within the current relationship between schools, the prison system, educational policy in Black Los Angeles, and a historical analysis of attacks on Black culture. By centering Black culture and the humanity of Black people, First Strike contributes to our understanding of the connections between mass incarceration and school failure and the effects of these phenomena on Black youth.

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